After years of skepticism, agentic AI is reshaping how CFOs run their organizations.
Working in conjunction, global accountancy and advisory firm PwC and OpenAI are bringing agentic AI to CFOs and their organizations. They promise that their agents can deliver benefits to the planning, forecasting, reporting, procurement, payments, treasury, and tax functions of financial organizations.
The technology is no longer seen as emerging—it is now widely accepted as an essential tool for optimizing operations and driving long-term growth.
As recently as October 2025, AI remained controversial. Deloitte in Australia faced a reported $290,000 judgment after it submitted a report to Australia’s Department of Employment and Workplace Relations that included a range of generative AI hallucinations, prompting litigation. Such incidents made accountants wary of the technology and its shortcomings.
Nevertheless, appreciation for AI input has rapidly evolved, with a little help from human touch. PwC and OpenAI have clearly defined roles: AI agents execute and coordinate work, while PwC employees supervise—a structure designed to reduce the risk of hallucinations.
OpenAI is presented as “customer zero.” The company uses its ChatGPT AI chatbot and Codex software coding agent in its own financial organization, where they “monitor payments, review contracts, update forecasts, and prepare reporting materials,” according to a prepared statement. Meanwhile, PwC implements that know-how in other companies. The lessons learned at OpenAI will help other CFOs.
Some of the complex corporate workflows that AI agents have managed, according to OpenAI officials, include processing five times more contracts without adding professionals to the existing team, and managing more than 200 investor interactions during a fundraising event.
PwC and OpenAI appear to have mastered the path to deploying agentic workflows.
Nevertheless, in this rapidly evolving new world, PwC doesn’t work exclusively with OpenAI. The firm recently announced another collaboration with OpenAI rival Anthropic. PwC is offering its large client portfolio access to Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant. Financial services, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences clients are particularly interested in Claude’s efficiencies, according to PwC. In the insurance sector, underwriting cycles could be reduced from weeks to days. In cybersecurity, agents respond to threats in minutes rather than hours. The reimagining of the CFO’s office is just beginning.
Cerebras Systems tumbles as margin worries outweigh OpenAI deal
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WASHINGTON — In congressional races across the country, a new crop of super PACs is taking to the air with millions of dollars worth of advertisements to sway voters.
“President Trump said it best, ‘Celeste Maloy will never let you down,’” says one advertisement supporting the Utah Republican representative in her upcoming primary election.
“Standing up to big pharma, fighting for local jobs, Val Hoyle doesn’t back down,” says an ad backing the Oregon Democratic representative ahead of her primary victory last month.
The super PACs have nondescript names — such as Jobs and Democracy PAC and American Mission — and the text is so generic that it almost seems to have been created by artificial intelligence.
That isn’t so far off the mark. The AI industry has funded the ads.
One network of super PACs is linked to Anthropic, maker of the popular AI tool Claude, and the other to Open AI, maker of ChatGPT.
They have been among the most prolific political spenders so far in the 2026 midterm elections, splashing out more than $37 million to date to influence races across the country and making the groups among the biggest outside spenders so far in congressional races. That number could grow exponentially as campaign season heats up closer to the November election — and as the Silicon Valley giants prepare initial pubic offerings that are poised to raise billions of dollars for the companies and their executives.
The AI political spending boom comes as emerging technology companies have become increasingly “comfortable with using their power to achieve a political goal,” said Adam Kovacevich, a former Google public policy executive and founder of Chamber of Progress, a technology trade group with a progressive orientation.
The leading AI companies have a history.
Anthropic was formed by former OpenAI employees who were concerned that the company was less focused on its original mission to safely harness the power of AI.
The companies are now the leading drivers of the burgeoning AI industry, and their competing views about how the technology should be regulated are playing out in a wide-ranging political ad spending war that has targeted congressional races in big cities and rural areas alike.
OpenAI thinks AI should be regulated solely at the federal level.
Anthropic calls for more stringent regulation and supports efforts by states such as New York and California that have passed more aggressive AI laws.
The groups spending in these races are super PACs, which are able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in federal races thanks to the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
In some races, the AI-backed political groups have spent more than the candidates they are backing.
“There was no way as a grassroots person that I could compete with that kind of money,” said Al Olszewski, whose opponent in a Montana Republican congressional primary beat him by 30 points after getting a boost from $877,000 in ads from a super PAC backed by OpenAI’s co-founder. “I got crushed.”
The AI behemoths have emphasized that they are independent from the political groups.
One group counts $25 million in support from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, alongside $100 million tied to one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, which holds a large stake in OpenAI. The global policy chief for OpenAI was reportedly involved in conceiving the group.
The other side has gotten $20 million from Anthropic and millions more from donors whose identities are not public.
This anonymous political cash is commonly known as dark money, and its prevalence is growing.
(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; source photos courtesy of the Tech Oversight Project)
“This has become very normalized now,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending. “In 2024, we tracked over $1 billion in dark money.”
That total was $350 million higher than the previous presidential election.
The political activity of these AI companies and executives reflects a dramatic shift from how emerging technology companies have historically engaged with politics.
Google, for example, didn’t hire its first in-house Washington lobbyist until after the company had gone public in 2005.
“I think that for a long time, the tech industry lobbying strategy was just ‘leave us alone,’” Kovacevich said.
He sees the spending by these AI-linked super PACs as following the recent playbook developed by the cryptocurrency industry, which has funded the only network of political groups that has spent more on congressional races this year than those linked to OpenAI.
“I think what the crypto industry realized was that there’s no substitute for building up political power,” Kovacevich said.
The political stakes for these technology companies are significant.
“AI policy is far from settled,” said Asad Ramzanali, the former deputy director for strategy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration and the director of artificial intelligence and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration banned foreign nationals from using the most powerful AI model developed by Anthropic — and even banned the company’s own employees from it — which forced the company to restrict access for all users.
The two super PAC networks have largely shied away from producing ads that mention AI and have mostly chosen to avoid competing against each other in the same races.
There’s one big exception.
In the marquee Manhattan Democratic congressional primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), each side has spent millions of dollars.
While the field includes Kennedy scion and social media star Jake Schlossberg and former Republican turned Trump critic George Conway, the target of all the AI-backed spending has been Alex Bores, a former Palantir data scientist who now serves in the New York state Assembly.
New York congressional candidate sponsored a state measure Bores requiring major AI companies to be transparent about their safety protocols and promptly report safety incidents.
(Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)
That’s because Bores sponsored a state bill, known as the RAISE Act, that requires major AI companies to be transparent about their safety protocols and promptly report safety incidents. The bill was signed into law in December 2025.
The ads sponsored by the group tied to OpenAI, which has spent more than $7.5 million in the race, paint Bores as someone who can’t be trusted.
They cite his support from other tech billionaires, including former crypto mogul and convicted financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, whose super PAC spent $100,000 to support Bores in 2022 when he first ran for New York Assembly.
“Is that really who should be shaping AI safety for our kids?” one ad asks.
An ad sponsored by the Anthropic-backed network, which has also spent more than $7.5 million supporting Bores, makes the case that the bill he sponsored is exactly why he should be elected.
“As a computer engineer, Alex Bores saw how dangerous unregulated AI could be and he wrote New York’s RAISE Act to put real safeguards on A.I. and hold big tech accountable,” the ad says.
The AI ad barrage in New York has even included what might be considered a kumbaya moment in the ad wars — another super PAC created to support Bores is most heavily backed by both an employee of Anthropic and an employee of OpenAI, who both focus on AI safety.
The group, Dream NYC, has spent more than $1.7 million supporting Bores.
Bores and fellow New York State Assemblymember Micah Lasher have been atop the most recent polls in the race ahead of the June 23 primary.
A general view of businesses in St. George, Utah, on Wednesday.
(Ian Maule / For The Times)
For voters in many parts of the country, the debate over AI policy has played out locally as a debate over the massive data centers required to power the technology.
In Utah, a proposed data center in Box Elder County, backed by “Shark Tank” television personality Kevin O’Leary, has generated controversy because of questions about its impact on resources in the drought-prone state and its environmental effect on the nearby Great Salt Lake.
In the state’s most competitive Republican congressional primary — the vast, newly drawn 3rd Congressional District — both candidates expressed concerns about how the project has been developed and called for greater transparency in this plan and for future data centers in the state.
Utah congressional candidates Phil Lyman and Celeste Maloy in a debate on June 1. A super PAC backed by Anthropic has spent more than $920,000 to support Maloy.
(Rick Egan / Pool / The Salt Lake Tribune Via Associated Press)
Despite their similar position on the project, a super PAC backed by Anthropic has spent more than $950,000 to support Maloy, who is running in the new district after the boundaries of her old district changed.
“It’s a lot of money to throw at a race,” said her opponent, Phil Lyman, a former conservative Republican state Representative who ran to the right of Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox in an unsuccessful primary challenge in 2024.
Lyman insists he is no AI skeptic.
“I’m not anti data centers, I’m pro-transparency,” he said. “I think the future is bright with AI.”
The group said it is backing Maloy because it sees her as “someone who’s worked the issue” of AI regulation and who “has demonstrated leadership” with Republicans in Congress.
Maloy’s campaign didn’t respond to request for comment.
Utah congressional candidate Phil Lyman speaks during a Cottage Meeting at the SunRiver Community Center Ballroom in St. George, Utah, on Wednesday.
(Ian Maule / For The Times)
But Lyman suspects the group’s support for Maloy ahead of their June 23 primary has more to do with old-fashioned politics than any emerging technology.
One of the two co-founders of the political group is Chris Stewart, Maloy’s predecessor in Congress.
“Everything that they’re doing feels very coordinated,” Lyman said. “It makes you wonder if he’s still really controlling that seat.”
Published on •Updated
SpaceX is pushing deeper into AI with its largest acquisition yet, striking a $60 billion (€51.7bn) all-stock agreement to buy Anysphere, the developer of the AI coding assistant Cursor.
The purchase, announced on Tuesday, is intended to strengthen SpaceX’s position in the enterprise AI market, where rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic have found early commercial traction.
Anysphere is a San Francisco startup that uses AI to automate large parts of software development, and its Cursor tool is widely used by programmers.
According to a regulatory filing, the two sides signed a merger agreement under which a SpaceX subsidiary, X67 Inc., will merge into Anysphere, leaving Cursor as a wholly owned subsidiary.
The merger is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, subject to regulatory approval.
The deal lands barely a week after Elon Musk’s company completed a blockbuster listing, and marks an aggressive move beyond rockets and satellites into enterprise AI software.
At the time of writing, SpaceX shares were trading a few cents below $200 in premarket trading, up more than 4% from Monday’s close and roughly 50% higher than its IPO price of $135.
Tuesday’s rally could see SpaceX overtake Amazon by market capitalisation if gains hold through the session.
The acquisition follows an option SpaceX secured in April, when it agreed to either acquire Cursor for $60 billion (€51.7bn) later in the year or pay $10 billion (€8.6bn) for a narrower partnership to provide compute.
Founded in 2022, Cursor has grown quickly, reporting roughly $2.6 billion (€2.2bn) in annualised business-to-business revenue, according to company data shared with Reuters this month.
The firm had previously raised more than $3 billion (€2.5bn) from backers including Nvidia and OpenAI.
SpaceX merged with Musk’s chatbot venture xAI in February, and this new deal could hand xAI a stronger position in AI-assisted coding, an area where it has trailed competitors, while giving Cursor access to far greater computing power.
The lawsuit originally filed in September focused on broader alleged misappropriation of confidential information.
Published On 15 Jun 202615 Jun 2026
A United States federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI that accused rival Sam Altman’s OpenAI of stealing trade secrets for chatbots.
US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco said on Monday that xAI failed to show that OpenAI induced former xAI senior engineer Xuechen Li to divulge confidential information related to its Grok chatbot, or that OpenAI engineers knew Li might have disclosed any.
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Lin dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, saying it would be “futile” to continue. She dismissed an earlier version in February. The lawsuit originally filed last September focused on broader alleged misappropriation of confidential information, including source code, by xAI employees who left for jobs at OpenAI.
Monday’s decision is Musk’s second legal loss against OpenAI in four weeks.
On May 18, a federal jury ruled against Musk, the world’s richest person, in his $150bn lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Altman of “stealing a charity” by betraying the company’s original mission as a nonprofit to enrich themselves.
The xAI business is part of Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company SpaceX.
Lawyers for xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. OpenAI and its lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.
The amended complaint focused on a presentation that Li gave while OpenAI was recruiting him.
Musk’s company said OpenAI wanted secrets related to the July 2025 release of Grok 4, knowing its forthcoming update to ChatGPT “could not compete” on complex reasoning, and because OpenAI was “lagging” in reinforcement learning and post-training techniques that Li understood.
But the judge said asking job candidates to discuss their prior work was routine, and one could not infer that OpenAI pushed Li to leak anything confidential.
“To hold otherwise would potentially expose employers to liability any time they inquire about a candidate’s past work,” Lin wrote.
OpenAI has said Li never worked for the company and that it never acquired xAI secrets.
In seeking dismissal, lawyers for OpenAI wrote: “OpenAI does not need or want anyone’s trade secrets, especially not from xAI, which is failing in the marketplace and hemorrhaging talent.”
Li is being sued separately by xAI and has denied wrongdoing.
Published on
OpenAI is facing a fresh regulatory challenge after a group of state attorneys general demanded a wide range of documents about how ChatGPT protects the people who use it, a move that arrives at a delicate moment for the company as it lays the groundwork for a potential public listing.
The investigation, which arrived just days after OpenAI filed confidential paperwork for an IPO, threatens to complicate a listing that some analysts expect will value the ChatGPT maker at roughly $1 trillion (€861bn).
According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the matter, OpenAI received the subpoena on Friday from a group of states, with the inquiry led by New York’s attorney general.
Officials are requesting material covering the company’s advertising practices, how it keeps people using its service, its handling of consumer and health data, and its policies towards minors and older adults.
OpenAI said it would engage with the offices behind the request and stressed that protections are already built into its product.
A spokesperson stated that the company takes the concerns raised by the attorneys general “seriously” and works to bring the benefits of the technology to people responsibly. However, the firm has not confirmed which other US states are taking part.
The subpoena adds to a growing list of legal headaches.
Last Thursday, a Canadian woman sued OpenAI, blaming ChatGPT for her daughter’s suicide. Earlier in June, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit against the company and CEO Sam Altman after two shootings in which the alleged attackers reportedly used the chatbot to plan their crimes.
OpenAI responded that its models repeatedly urged the individuals to seek help from mental health professionals and that it cooperated with the police in both cases.
These are not the first courtroom tests of the year for OpenAI.
In May, a federal jury in Oakland, California took less than two hours to reject Elon Musk’s lawsuit accusing Altman of abandoning the firm’s nonprofit roots, finding he had filed too late. Musk, who called the ruling a “calendar technicality”, said he would appeal.
The clampdown also extends across the industry.
European regulators have opened investigations into Musk’s rival chatbot Grok over antisemitic and sexualised content, including deepfake images.
Anthropic, also preparing an IPO, was told by the Trump administration to restrict two of its models abroad on national security grounds, illustrating how AI governance has become an increasingly fraught political battleground.
Additional sources • AP
Key deals this week: GSK, Incyte, Ingredion, OpenAI, and more
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June 8 (UPI) — Artificial intelligence company OpenAI confidentially filed for an initial public offering Monday, becoming the third in a well-known trio of U.S. AI companies to do so in the past few weeks.
Rival AI company Anthropic filed for an IPO on June 1, and SpaceX (which merged with xAI, also owned by Elon Musk) filed in late May. SpaceX’s debut is set for Friday. All three are expected to be very lucrative for early investors, as they have valuations around $1 trillion, Axios reported.
OpenAI said in a post that there has been no decision on the IPO’s timing yet.
“It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” the post said.
The company has had both successes and trials in recent months, CNN reported. Musk lost a lawsuit against it in mid-May because of the statute of limitations, and the company has expanded ChatGPT options and other AI tools and programs.
However, the company and founder/CEO Sam Altman are also facing lawsuits because of ChatGPT’s role in recent shootings and other issues. Florida announced last week that it is suing the company and Altman, claiming the company chose “profits over public safety” in creating a dangerous product in the form of ChatGPT. The state also has an ongoing criminal investigation into the company.
Individuals including the family members of those killed or injured in a recent school shooting have also sued, saying that the company should have warned authorities about the shooter’s interactions with ChatGPT.
1 of 2 | Florida is suing OpenAI and its CEO and founder Sam Altman over safety and design concerns about ChatGPT. File photo by Wu Hao/EPA-EFE
June 1 (UPI) — Florida’s attorney general announced Monday that the state is suing OpenAI and its founder and CEO, Sam Altman, saying the company chose “profits over public safety” in creating a dangerous product in the form of ChatGPT. It is the first state to sue the company over these design and safety concerns.
“The rise of OpenAI is attributable to a web of deceit and the exploitation of users (including Floridians), leveraging their data and safety to boost OpenAI’s market value at unacceptable costs,” the complaint filed by Attorney General James Uthmeier said, NBC News reported.
The lawsuit claims that OpenAI violated Florida’s rules on deceptive business practices and knew that its chatbot could be dangerous to children and others through actions such as providing “harmful information such as tips on eating disorders, self-harm and mass murder,” The New York Times reported. It says OpenAI presents “a great danger of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence and related harms.”
The civil suit is separate from Florida’s ongoing criminal investigation into OpenAI, which Uthmeier openedin April. It includes multiple counts of deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence, violations of product liability laws, fraudulent misrepresentation and causing a public nuisance.
OpenAI representatives have not yet commented on this lawsuit. Representatives have said in response to past claims that the company designs its systems with safety in mind and that there are “safeguards in placeto help people, especially teens, when conversations turn sensitive.”
“We continue improving ChatGPT’s training to recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress, de-escalate conversations and guide people toward real-world support,” the company said in a prior statement.
The lawsuits also mentions OpenAI’s connections to a mass shooting at Florida State University and killings at the University of South Florida. In both cases, suspects asked ChatGPT for information connected to the attacks.
President Trump signed an executive order on artificial intelligence Tuesday, less than two weeks after postponing a White House ceremony over his concerns that a similar policy could dull America’s edge on AI technology.
The order establishes a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release. The government will be able to work with trusted partners “that will have early access to covered frontier models to promote secure innovation and strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure,” the order says.
It was not immediately clear to what extent the order differed from the one he declined to sign on May 21.
Trump canceled an Oval Office event with tech industry executives last month because he did not like what he saw in the earlier version of the order’s text. “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead,” Trump told reporters at the time.
That directive was characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
O’Brien writes for the Associated Press.
OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon speaks during a press conference on the Korea Cyber Action Plan in Seoul on Wednesday. Photo by Asia Today
May 27 (Asia Today) — OpenAI said Wednesday it will expand artificial intelligence-based cyber defense cooperation with the South Korean government, public agencies and companies in key industries.
The company announced its Korea Cyber Action Plan during a press conference at the JW Marriott Hotel in Seoul’s Seocho District. The plan is designed to give government agencies, public institutions and companies broader access to OpenAI’s advanced AI cyber models.
Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said AI has entered a third stage as an “intelligence utility,” becoming core infrastructure for the economy and society after earlier phases focused on capability breakthroughs and broader access.
Kwon said South Korea is well positioned to adopt AI because it is a digital-first society that quickly embraces new technologies and has a “full-stack economy” with global semiconductor companies including Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.
“Advanced cyber AI capabilities should not remain in the hands of only a few,” Kwon said. “Korea’s key defenders should be able to use them to strengthen collective security and public safety.”
“Korea is a very important country for OpenAI,” he said. “We hope to become an important partner in Korea’s AI transformation and in strengthening national resilience.”
The Korea Cyber Action Plan is part of Daybreak, OpenAI’s global cybersecurity initiative that aims to build security into systems from the earliest stages of development. OpenAI says Daybreak is designed to help cyber defenders identify threats, generate patches and verify fixes across code and systems.
A key part of the plan is expanding Trusted Access for Cyber, a program that gives verified defensive users access to specialized cyber AI models. OpenAI said in April it was scaling the program to thousands of verified individual defenders and hundreds of teams responsible for protecting critical software.
Kwon said access for the South Korean government to the government version of the program is in its final stage. He said OpenAI is also discussing adoption of the private-sector program with several Korean companies.
Asked about potential misuse of cyber models and data leakage risks, Kwon said OpenAI is controlling risk by granting access only to “trusted defenders” who go through strict verification.
He also said OpenAI supports data residency in South Korea, allowing data to be processed on domestic servers. Public agencies and companies may also choose an option in which data is not stored at all, he said.
Kwon said OpenAI has begun talks with the Korea AI Safety Institute under the Ministry of Science and ICT. He said the company will draw on its experience working with AI safety institutes in the United States and Britain to help South Korea build its own model evaluation capabilities.
Before Wednesday’s announcement, OpenAI had been deepening cooperation with South Korea’s public sector. On May 18, Sasha Baker, OpenAI’s head of national security policy, visited South Korea and demonstrated the company’s latest cyber-focused models to major agencies including the science ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the Financial Services Commission and the National AI Strategy Committee.
On Tuesday, Kwon met with Ryu Je-myung, second vice minister of science and ICT, to discuss AI security cooperation. OpenAI also signed memorandums of understanding with Korea Water Resources Corp. and Korea Technology Finance Corp.
Kwon emphasized the company’s expectations for the Korean market.
“Korea is a country with very favorable conditions to turn AI into national competitiveness,” he said. “Based on ChatGPT, Korea is already one of the top 10 markets globally, and the speed of AI adoption is very fast.”
OpenAI said use of Codex in South Korea is also growing quickly. Weekly active users of ChatGPT Codex in the country have increased tenfold since the beginning of the year, placing South Korea among the top five countries by usage.
More than half of the requests come from non-development work such as document writing, analysis, research and operations, showing the potential for wider enterprise use, the company said.
Kwon said changes in OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft have made it possible to provide OpenAI API services through a wider range of cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, and that enterprise growth is expected to accelerate.
On pricing for enterprise services, Kwon said consumer subscriptions and corporate services are different, and that business customers already use contract-based pricing. Over the long term, he said OpenAI aims to provide stronger AI performance at the same cost or lower unit prices so more users can benefit.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.
Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260527010008011
On Monday morning, a jury in Oakland, California, announced its verdict in one of the most-watched tech feuds between billionaire Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The nine-member jury handed a decisive victory to Altman, saying Musk had waited too long to bring his claims against the artificial intelligence company and its top executives.
Musk, who cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit, had filed a $150bn lawsuit against the organisation, Altman and its president, Greg Brockman, accusing them of turning it into a for-profit entity for personal enrichment.
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The verdict, however, stopped short of resolving the central question at the heart of the case, whether OpenAI betrayed the nonprofit mission on which it was founded in 2015 as it transformed from a research lab focused on benefitting humanity into one of the world’s most powerful AI companies.
Instead, the case became focused on a procedural issue. After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury unanimously found that the statute of limitations had expired before Musk filed the lawsuit in 2024, meaning jurors concluded he had waited too long to bring his claims under the applicable legal deadline. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the finding and dismissed the case.
The ruling removes a major legal threat for OpenAI at a pivotal moment for the company, which is deepening its commercial partnerships, expanding its relationship with Microsoft and moving towards what could become one of the largest public offerings in Silicon Valley history; while for Musk, the ruling leaves room to argue that the case was lost on timing rather than substance.
Shortly after the verdict, Musk repeated his accusations on X. “Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it!” Musk wrote on X. “Creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.”
Musk has decided to appeal, ensuring that the increasingly bitter feud between two of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures is unlikely to end any time soon.
Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Brockman and other researchers at a time when concerns were growing over how AI could reshape society.
The idea, according to testimony and internal discussions presented during the trial, was that the company could focus on building safe AI systems that benefitted humanity rather than prioritising shareholder returns.
Musk and Altman also believed the nonprofit structure would help OpenAI compete with technology giants such as Google by attracting top researchers and positioning the organisation as a mission-driven alternative.
Musk claims he contributed roughly $38m to OpenAI during its early years, but relations between the founders later deteriorated sharply. He resigned from OpenAI’s board in February 2018, officially citing potential conflicts of interest as Tesla became more focused on AI.
But the split deepened after OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary and Microsoft invested heavily in the company. Microsoft has since committed tens of billions of dollars to its partnership with OpenAI, helping transform ChatGPT into one of the defining products of the global AI boom.
Musk became increasingly critical of the company, arguing that OpenAI had moved far beyond the nonprofit vision on which it was founded. In 2023, he launched a rival AI company, xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot, before filing his lawsuit against OpenAI the following year.
At the centre of the trial was a relatively technical legal question about when Musk became aware that OpenAI was moving towards a profit-driven structure.
Because the lawsuit was filed in 2024, Musk needed to convince jurors that the alleged wrongdoing occurred within the legal time limit for bringing his claims.
Musk argued that his concerns fully crystallised only in 2023, particularly after Microsoft’s big investments into OpenAI’s for-profit arm.
But OpenAI’s lawyers argued that Musk had known for years that the company planned to pursue a commercial structure and raise huge amounts of outside funding.
Evidence presented during the trial showed that discussions about creating a for-profit arm dated back to at least 2017. Jurors also heard testimony that Altman had sent Musk documents in 2018 outlining plans for OpenAI to raise billions of dollars through a for-profit structure.
Ultimately, the jury sided with OpenAI’s argument that Musk could have filed his lawsuit much earlier – and therefore waited too long.
That meant jurors never had to answer the more explosive question at the centre of the case about whether OpenAI had actually betrayed its founding mission.
OpenAI maintained throughout the trial that there was never an agreement to remain a nonprofit indefinitely. Its lawyers argued that Musk understood from the beginning that developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence would require extraordinary levels of funding and computing power.
OpenAI also portrayed Musk’s lawsuit as partly motivated by rivalry. By the time the case reached court, Musk’s xAI had emerged as a direct competitor to OpenAI in the race to develop advanced AI systems.
Meanwhile, OpenAI had become one of the most powerful companies in the technology industry, reportedly valued at more than $800bn and moving towards what could eventually become one of the largest public offerings in history.
Lawyers for OpenAI argued that Musk became hostile only after losing influence within the company and watching Altman turn OpenAI into the dominant force in generative AI.
Although the verdict was a clear legal victory for OpenAI, the trial never became the sweeping test case about the future of artificial intelligence that many had expected.
Because the case was resolved on procedural grounds, the court did not answer some of the biggest questions raised by the AI boom: how these systems should be governed, who should benefit economically from them, and whether companies developing increasingly powerful AI tools can still claim to act in the public interest while pursuing enormous commercial growth.
The trial also touched only briefly on broader concerns surrounding AI development, including transparency, labour and the extraction of data used to train AI systems.
Nicole Turner Lee, director of the Centre for Technology Innovation, told Al Jazeera that one of the central problems surrounding AI is that the technology is deeply “extractive”.
“It does undergo theft where people do not consent as to whether or not their information, their image, their voice, their text are actually being extracted,” she said, raising concerns about compensation and consent in AI training systems.
Those issues remained largely outside the scope of the trial due to it ultimately centring on procedural issues.
The ruling, therefore, also removed the possibility of a far more disruptive outcome that could have threatened OpenAI’s corporate structure, its partnership with Microsoft and the wider wave of investment pouring into the AI industry.
But the broader debate over AI’s future is far from settled. With Musk preparing an appeal, the courtroom battle between the two former allies looks set to continue alongside wider questions about how AI should be governed.
A jury on Monday rejected Elon Musk’s claims against Sam Altman and OpenAI (OPENAI) following less than two hours of deliberations, ending a high-profile legal battle between the tech billionaires, according to media reports.
The nine-person jury unanimously found that
By AFP, Reuters and The Associated Press
Published On 12 May 202612 May 2026
In a United States court, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has rejected claims from fellow tech mogul Elon Musk that he betrayed the artificial intelligence company’s original vision.
Tuesday marked the start of Altman’s testimony in a contentious trial unfolding in Oakland, California, between some of tech’s richest and most powerful titans.
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Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, has sued Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman on the basis that they “stole a charity” by shifting its purpose.
He alleged that OpenAI’s leader persuaded him to invest $38bn, based on a goal of improving humanity, only to see the company pivot to a for-profit venture in 2019.
On the witness stand on Tuesday, Altman instead framed Musk as a competitor obsessed with exercising control over OpenAI.
“It does not fit with my conception of the words ‘stealing a charity’ to look at what has actually happened here,” Altman told the court.
The two men have long had an acrimonious relationship, driven in part by differing views about artificial intelligence.
Musk — a self-described free speech “absolutist” — currently runs his own AI chatbot, Grok, which has been accused of perpetuating right-wing conspiracy theories and offensive materials.
He is seeking $150bn in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, one of its principal investors.
Altman’s testimony comes more than two weeks into the trial, which has seen him and Musk square off against each other.
In his testimony, Altman argued that Musk knew of the plans to develop OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise when he invested, and he asserted that Musk even petitioned to have a majority stake in the company.
“An early number that Mr Musk threw out was that he should have 90 percent of the equity to start,” Altman told the jury. “It then softened, but it always was a majority.”
The outcome of the trial could determine the future of OpenAI, its leadership, and products like ChatGPT. As part of his lawsuit, Musk is pushing for the removal of Altman and Brockman.
The trial comes as OpenAI prepares for a potential initial public offering that could see it valued at $1 trillion, a historically large sum.
During earlier testimony, Musk portrayed Altman as a liar who could not be trusted with the development of the technology.
“If you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI, I think that’s a very big danger for the whole world,” Musk said.
Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, also sought to undermine Altman’s reliability during questioning on Tuesday.
“Have you misled people when you do business?” Molo asked Altman.
“I do not think so,” Altman replied.
Altman, meanwhile, sought to cast doubt on Musk’s leadership; Musk ultimately left OpenAI’s board in 2018 to pursue his own AI development.
“I don’t think Mr Musk understood how to run a good research lab,” Altman said. “He had demotivated some of our most key researchers.”
The US public, for its part, has been largely unconvinced by high-minded rhetoric about the transformative potential of AI.
A March 2026 poll by the Pew Research Center suggested that a majority of respondents in the US believe AI will worsen, rather than improve, the ability to think creatively, form meaningful relationships, make difficult decisions, and solve problems.
Just 10 percent of respondents said they were more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life.
But the industry has been quick to translate its substantial economic power into political influence as lawmakers consider how best to regulate the technology.
The use of AI has emerged as an election-season issue as the US midterms approach in November, and the administration of President Donald Trump has proposed a “national policy framework” for the technology to avoid a patchwork of state regulations.
The AI industry has become a driver of eye-watering investment in recent years, with the United Nations estimating that the global market could be worth $4.8 trillion by 2033.
WASHINGTON — The chair of the House Oversight Committee has sent a letter to OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman requesting information about potential conflicts of interest between Altman’s personal investments and his operation of the company.
The letter, sent Friday, comes amid a high-stakes legal battle currently playing out in an Oakland federal courtroom between one-time partners Altman and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who in 2015 co-founded the AI company best known for creating ChatGPT.
The company was first established solely as a non-profit corporation and the letter sent to Altman by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the Republican chair of the Oversight committee, indicates that the committee is “investigating potential conflicts of interest involving capital from nonprofit corporations invested in startups and other for-profit companies.”
Comer has requested by May 22 a briefing from the company official responsible for oversight of potential conflicts involving company officers and directors, including Altman, as well as all documents related to conflict of interest policies and guidance for those executives.
While OpenAI was created as a non-profit designed to responsibly harness the power of the emerging artificial intelligence technology, the company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 and three years later released ChatGPT, which jumpstarted widespread adoption of the technology.
Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, left Open AI’s board in 2018, one year before the creation of the for-profit arm. He is arguing that Altman and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, betrayed the original mission of the non-profit organization, driven by their desire to “cash in” on the technology.
Musk added Microsoft, a significant investor in OpenAI, to the lawsuit in 2024. OpenAI is rumored to be gearing up to go public later this year or early next, and was recently valued at $852 billion.
Musk has said that he invested $38 million in the OpenAI non-profit, but he does not stand to benefit from a potential OpenAI public offering.
He created a rival company xAI in 2023 that was later folded into his company SpaceX
In the lawsuit, Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages, for Altman to be removed from the company and for the company to be fully returned to its non-profit status.
Musk’s complaint also alleges that Altman engaged in self-dealing by directing OpenAI to pursue deals with companies in which he also held a personal stake, including nuclear fusion power company Helion.
Comer’s letter cites reporting that Altman’s pursuit of a Helion deal, which is still ongoing, would come at a lofty valuation of the power-company, boosting the company’s worth, and the value of Altman’s investment.
Altman was briefly forced to step down from leadership of OpenAI in 2023 in part due to concerns about potential conflicts between his personal investments and his operation of the company, but was soon reinstated.
While the company’s board created an audit committee to investigate the potential conflicts of Altman and other officers, the findings were never disclosed.
Comer has requested that Altman turn over all documents and communication related to that audit committee.
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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OpenAI (OPENAI) President Greg Brockman told a federal court on Tuesday that Elon Musk’s apparent lack of knowledge about AI made OpenAI’s early leadership leery about giving him control of the company.
“Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars,” Brockman said,
The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI, and jury selection starts on Monday.
Published On 27 Apr 202627 Apr 2026
Technology tycoons Elon Musk and Sam Altman are poised to face off in a high-stakes trial revolving around the alleged betrayal, deceit and unbridled ambition that blurred the bickering billionaires’ once-shared vision for the development of artificial intelligence.
The trial, which is scheduled to begin on Monday with jury selection, centres on the 2015 birth of ChatGPT maker OpenAI as a nonprofit start-up primarily funded by Musk before evolving into a capitalistic venture now valued at $852bn.
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The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI, breakthrough technology that is increasingly being feared as a potential job killer and an existential threat to humanity’s survival.
Those perceived risks are among the reasons that Musk, the world’s richest person, has cited for filing a lawsuit in August 2024 that will now be decided by a jury and US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California.
The civil lawsuit accuses Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, and his top lieutenant and a cofounder, Greg Brockman, of double-crossing Musk by straying from the San Francisco company’s founding mission to be an altruistic steward of a revolutionary technology. The lawsuit alleges they shifted OpenAI into moneymaking mode behind his back.
The bitter legal fight may come down to a few pages in one executive’s personal diary.
“This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon,” wrote Brockman in the autumn of 2017. “Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick?”
Brockman’s diary entry is part of the thousands of pages of internal documents revealed in court.
Musk said the defendants kept him in the dark about their plans, exploited his name and financial support to create a “wealth machine” for themselves, and owe damages for having conned him and the public.
He also wants OpenAI to revert to a nonprofit, for Altman and Brockman to be removed as officers and for Altman to be removed from its board.
OpenAI has brushed off Musk’s allegations as an unfounded case of sour grapes that’s aimed at undercutting its rapid growth and bolstering Musk’s own xAI, which he launched in 2023 as a competitor.
The trial also carries risks for Musk, who last month was held liable by another jury for defrauding investors during his $44bn takeover of Twitter in 2022. Any damaging details about Musk and his business tactics could be particularly hurtful now because his rocket ship maker, SpaceX, plans to go public this summer in an initial public offering that could make him the world’s first trillionaire.
Musk fraud claims against Altman, OpenAI dismissed
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Some of our finest contemporary writers got their laurels Friday night at the 46th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.
At the awards ceremony, which opens the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books weekend, Oakland-born writer Amy Tan and literary nonprofit We Need Diverse Books received achievement honors, and finalists in 13 other categories became prize winners.
The presenters and awardees who took the stage balanced a spirit of playfulness — Times senior editor Sophia Kercher called the weekend’s festival “my personal Coachella” and Times columnist LZ Granderson saluted his fellow “booktroverts” — and one of reverence as they celebrated writing as an instrument for advocacy, imagination and history-keeping.
As Bench Ansfield virtually accepted his award in the history category for “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City,” which exposes a pattern of landlords setting residential fires to collect insurance payouts, he said, “It’s a scary time to be a historian in the United States.”
“Our field, like so many other fields, is under attack,” Ansfield said. “To understand the crises in front of us, we have to understand our history.”
Among the crises highlighted was AI encroachment, the subject of science and technology category winner Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.” The AI expert and investigative journalist’s book is a critical investigation into the rise of OpenAI and its impact on society.
In Hao’s acceptance speech, read by presenter Jia-Rui Cook in her absence, the author said she “can’t help but be disturbed by how the themes of this book have grown more relevant by the day.”
“That said, I have never been more hopeful of our chance to advance a different future,” the author said, adding that L.A.’s history of resistance movements — including the recent Hollywood strikes — made it an apt place to accept her award.
“Gatherings like this are one of many radical acts of resistance against the imperial project that seeks to strip us of our meaning and our humanity,” Hao said. “Let us continue to resist defiantly together and let us remember lessons in history: When people rise, empires always fall.”
Tan echoed Hao’s sentiments as she accepted the Robert Kirsch Award, which celebrates literature with regional and thematic connections to the Western United States, for her acclaimed portfolio of writing exploring identity and cultural inheritance — often through the lens of the immigrant experience.
In her speech, “The Joy Luck Club” writer said that while she never particularly considered herself a “political writer,” her stance on that has changed as government actions have made her think critically about her own identities.
“My birthright and that of millions of others is now being argued before the Supreme Court, and no matter what the outcome is, it’s been a kick in the gut to know that those in the highest echelons of government and those who support them believe that we don’t belong.”
As an author, Tan said, “I imagine the lives of the people I write about,” and that act of compassion, for writers, inherently “reflects our politics and our beliefs. And so yes, I am a political writer.”
Later, Caroline Richmond, executive director of We Need Diverse Books, celebrated the work of her nonprofit — the recipient of this year’s Innovator’s Award — which has made it so her daughter “has never really had to look that far to find herself on the page.”
Still, she said ongoing book bans are threatening those strides toward a more diverse literary marketplace.
“The work is very much far from over,” Richmond said, “but I have to remind myself that the people banning books are never the good guys in history, and it’s up to us in this room and beyond — as readers, as book lovers — to fight back because diverse books, we really need them now more than ever.”
As the ceremony wore on, the room was as charged with celebration as it was with resistance.
When writer-editor and former child actor Adam Ross accepted the Christopher Isherwood Prize for “Playworld,” a semi-autobiographical novel about a teen growing up in 1980s New York, he gleamed with joy about his second novel being out in the world and finding readers.
“When it became clear to me that I was writing something that was going to be a lot bigger and take a lot longer than I planned, I promised myself I would use all of my ability to capture my experience of a particular era in an enduringly magical city, and to hopefully express it in such a way that any reader willing to embark on a journey with me, but upon finishing close the book and say, ‘Yes, I know exactly what that was like,’” Ross said in his acceptance speech.
“Winning this award makes me feel like I succeeded in that endeavor,” the author said.
Other winners included Ekow Eshun, who topped the biography category for “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them,” which parses Black masculinity as embodied by various civil rights activists, philosophers and other visionaries, and Bryan Washington, who accepted the fiction award for “Palaver,” which details the tense reunion of a Jamaican-born mother and her queer son, who are navigating years of estrangement in Tokyo.
The 31st annual L.A. Times Festival of Books will host 500-plus authors and celebrities and 300-plus exhibitors across more than 200 events including panels, book signings and cooking demonstrations. Top-billed guests include musician-memoirist Lionel Richie, veteran actor and recent Golden Globe Carol Burnett Award honoree Sarah Jessica Parker, and the mastermind behind “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David.
The schedule for the Saturday-Sunday event can be found here.
Here’s the full list of finalists and winners for the Book Prizes.
Amy Tan
We Need Diverse Books
Adam Ross, “Playworld: A Novel”
Andy Anderegg, “Plum”
Krystelle Bamford, “Idle Grounds: A Novel”
Addie E. Citchens, “Dominion: A Novel”
Justin Haynes, “Ibis: A Novel” | WINNER
Saou Ichikawa translated by Polly Barton, “Hunchback: A Novel”
Molly Jong-Fast (narrator), Matie Argiropoulos (producer); “How to Lose Your Mother”
Jason Mott, Ronald Peet, and JD Jackson (narrators), Diane McKiernan (producer); “People Like Us: A Novel”
James Aaron Oh (narrator), Linda Korn (producer); “The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel”
Imani Perry (narrator), Suzanne Mitchell (producer); “Black in Blues”
Maggi-Meg Reed, Jane Oppenheimer, Carly Robins, Jeff Ebner, David Pittu, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Mark Bramhall, Petrea Burchard, Robert Petkoff, Kimberly Farr, Cerris Morgan-Moyer, Peter Ganim, Jade Wheeler, Steve West, and Jim Seybert (narrators), Kelly Gildea (producer); “The Correspondent: A Novel” | WINNER
Joe Dunthorne, “Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance”
Ekow Eshun, “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them” | WINNER
Ruth Franklin, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank”
Beth Macy, “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America”
Amanda Vaill, “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution”
Jeanne Carstensen, “A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis”
Stefan Fatsis, “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary”
Brian Goldstone, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” | WINNER
Gardiner Harris, “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson”
Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World”
Tod Goldberg, “Only Way Out: A Novel”
Stephen Graham Jones, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”
Mia McKenzie, “These Heathens: A Novel”
Andrés Felipe Solano translated by Will Vanderhyden, “Gloria: A Novel”
Bryan Washington, “Palaver: A Novel” | WINNER
Eagle Valiant Brosi, “Black Cohosh”
Jaime Hernandez, “Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection” | WINNER
Michael D. Kennedy, “Milk White Steed”
Lee Lai, “Cannon”
Carol Tyler, “The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief”
Char Adams, “Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore”
Bench Ansfield, “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City” | WINNER
Jennifer Clapp, “Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters”
Eli Erlick, “Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950”
Aaron G. Fountain Jr., “High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America”
Megan Abbott, “El Dorado Drive” | WINNER
Ace Atkins, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World: A Novel”
Lou Berney, “Crooks: A Novel About Crime and Family”
Michael Connelly, “The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel”
S.A. Cosby, “King of Ashes: A Novel”
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “The New Economy”
Chet’la Sebree, “Blue Opening: Poems”
Richard Siken, “I Do Know Some Things”
Devon Walker-Figueroa, “Lazarus Species: Poems”
Allison Benis White, “A Magnificent Loneliness” | WINNER
Stephen Graham Jones, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”
Jordan Kurella, “The Death of Mountains”
Nnedi Okorafor, “Death of the Author: A Novel”
Adam Oyebanji, “Esperance”
Silvia Park, “Luminous: A Novel” | WINNER
Mariah Blake, “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals”
Peter Brannen, “The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World”
Karen Hao, “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI” | WINNER
Laura Poppick, “Strata: Stories from Deep Time”
Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World”
K. Ancrum, “The Corruption of Hollis Brown”
Idris Goodwin, “King of the Neuro Verse”
Jamie Jo Hoang, “My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser”
Trung Le Nguyen, “Angelica and the Bear Prince” | WINNER
Hannah V. Sawyerr, “Truth Is: A Novel in Verse”